Development

Getting started with OBS on MeeGo

Witht he release of the community OBS on meego.com (and the forthcoming Fremantle OBS for maemo.org); people are asking how to get started using this new, and more powerful, build system. The documentation on the wiki, though, is taking shape:This track will give you a brief introduction to the features and capabilities of the OBS instance hosted at build.[pub.]meego.com. [...] You'll learn how to use the webinterface, the commandline client and create your first package. The packaging guidelines and more advanced topics are also covered.One of the inherent problems with documenting this stuff is that the infrastructure experts deploying it either know it too well, or don't use it day-to-day for their own development needs. It's therefore encouraged that if you find errors, omissions or wish to help expand it further, you get stuck in and make changes to the wiki documents.

Using Shed Skin to compile Python to C++

George Ruinelli wanted to speed up the algorithms of his Python applications, without sacrificing the development speed; so he looked to a project to compile Python modules into proper object code, allowing near-native performance. He introduces his article on the subject:Shed Skin is a tool to create python modules writen in c. This is usually used to speed up program code which is time critial and where python is too slow. The authors of Shedskin say the following about it: 'Shed Skin is an experimental compiler, that can translate pure, but implicitly statically typed Python programs into optimized C++. It can generate stand-alone programs or extension modules that can be imported and used in larger Python programs.' As I write some python software for my Maemo based phone N900, I started to look into speeding up some of the program code.The application "SleepAnalyser", by George, is using Shed Skin in its 1.8 version in Extras-devel.

Qt Creator 2.1, with Qt Quick features, gets release candidate

Nokia have published a release candidate of Qt Creator 2.1, the IDE component of the Qt SDK:The Release Candidate is the last stop before Qt Creator 2.1 reaches final release. As per all of our releases, the Release Candidate is the exact version we intend to release, put out there for you to use as part of a familiarisation and final review process. Key elements within Qt Creator 2.1 that are not present in 2.0 are the tooling components for Qt Quick. These represent the third and final piece of Qt Quick.Attila Csipa gave a quick demo of the Qt Quick features in the IDE to your editor at the MeeGo Conference, and he was very impressed. The visual and source focuses, but with features available in both and the ability to switch between them within the same project are very enticing; and should allow a closer collaboration between designers and developers in Maemo, MeeGo and Symbian applications.